The Most Endangered

The Guardian has published a photo essay of the 100-most endangered species at risk today.   If you look at these creatures most may appear insignificant, hardly worth bothering about.   That is if you don't understand biodiversity and the critical role it plays in making all our lives, well, liveable.

Everything is connected.   When you're sitting at the top of your particular food chain that's easily overlooked.   Yet, beneath you, is a long chain of critters from microbes to plants to insects, little critters, bigger critters and really big critters that you and I need if we're to exist.   Some creatures are needed as prey, others as predators.  Wipe out one of those, the other goes into severe decline or, worse, overpopulates.

It's estimated the deer population in New England is now four times its numbers when the Pilgrims first arrived.   They wiped out the predators - wolves and cougars - and so the deer populated to become a serious pest problem.   Here on Vancouver Island, the Victoria region has its own deer overpopulation problem because they too drove out their wolves and cougars.   Now some want to start rounding them up and shipping them north to where the wolf and cougar populations are already considerable.  Think that's not screwed up?   Wait until you're awakened from a sound sleep in the middle of a summer night by the astonishingly loud purring of a cougar beneath your bedroom window.

Yeah, that's no house cat.

The point is, when you look at these creatures in The Guardian remember that, while it probably won't be apparent to you, each of them has evolved to fill a vital place in some food chain and, when they disappear, don't count on the effects being benign.

A search of this blog turned up an earlier post on a U.N. report that found biodiversity loss is a greater threat to life than global warming.